@mischievoustomato @allison IDK.
I feel that, as both hardware and Linux shit got more advanced and automated, it also became more complex and cumbersome to manually maintain.
LILO was incredibly simple, as far as bootloaders go, and had a very easy syntax. Grub, by comparison, was very complex. TBH, I haven't bothered to mess with systemd yet, so IDK how simple it is in that regard.
But systemd has more or less the same problem, and it's one of the reasons people hate it. Init.d was very simple, a bunch of files with relatively easy syntax it was easy to understand and mess with. By contrast, systemd works in a very different way and requires the uses of specific commands to mess with, it's a bit more of a chore to do it.
Same with xfree86 in comparison to the more complex xorg. And now Wayland. I'm playing with Wayland in my opensuse install, I installed Hyprland, and, as far as I understood, you can't even directly mess with Wayland.

It also doesn't help that even device names are shittier nowadays. It used to be /dev/hda1, hda2, etc. Or /dev/sda.
Now, the drives in my PC are named /dev/pcie00000:18:03:74/nvme1 or something like that, so yeah, screw it, let the distro tools automate everything, I have no time for this shit.